VP of Marketing turned CRO?

Can a marketing leader become a Chief Revenue Officer?

This week I started CRO School at Pavilion and the first session introduced the CRO Role. 

Russel Mikowski took us through the following topics:

• The many ways you can move into the CRO role

• The subroles within the CRO role

• An Execution Framework

• What Revenue Responsibility really means

• A Typical CRO Org

• Defining winning systems, metrics and KPIs, 

• Your relationship with the CFO, CEO, Board

• Being the VOC

• Recruitment and Scaling

• Your Compensation

I bolded “A Typical CRO Org” above because this was the topic that sparked the most conversation in our cohort group. For those not familiar with Pavilion Courses, cohorts are small groups of students that must meet outside of the course to complete it - like a study group.

“Should marketing report up into the CRO?”

 and “Can a marketing leader become a CRO?”

I think the answer we landed on was  “it depends”. Which is the truth. It does highly depend on lots of things! Like: the CMO’s experience and expertise, sales and marketing leadership capabilities and experience, what the business needs at the time etc…

I am in the unique position of VP of Sales Development and I am in the marketing org, reporting into the CMO while working very closely with both sales and marketing. 

In the last 2.5 years, I’ve lived through the five stages of tension between sales and marketing, and I am now proudly in the acceptance stage. I’ve become fluent in the language of both marketing and sales so much so that I pride myself in acting as a liaison, facilitator, and mediator between the two. 

My perspective is unique because regardless of how versed in marketing our sales leaders are, or how versed in growth and revenue our marketing leaders are, I’ve witnessed leaders on both teams experiencing difficulty working together. Mostly due to the following:

• Barriers to effective communication because of different default modes of communication or overall poor communication

• Assumptions about the motive of the other party because of differing default modes of working within their own teams

• Assuming negative intent as a symptom of lack of understanding of the other party

• Lack of formal modes for cross-functional feedback

• Conflicting incentives and goals including conflicting definitions of success

• No highlighted models of true and successful cross-collaboration leading to its de-prioritization

Its important to note that the above are all exacerbated by the many manifestations of stress that come to work with their people.

We cannot teach sales how to fluently speak marketing and we cannot teach marketing how to fluently speak sales. Mainly because of the way the working world prizes specialization. 

But what I’ve seen is a true desire from both orgs to want to work together cohesively. And what I know is that in this new era of tech sales, a cohesive go-to-market strategy is table stakes.

My role has forced me to help both functions understand each other. I’ve seen enough marketing campaigns, product releases, packages, or intent signals on their way to becoming dust in the wind that I now know what the leading indicators are and when and how to act on them.

There are complexities and barriers in organizations of all sizes that will always force us to adapt. But as someone sitting in the middle of these two orgs, incentivized on revenue and lead generation, and emboldened to be the bridge between the two, I (finally) feel at peace with the desires and needs of both. 

Lastly, the question of all questions:

“How do we fix the tension between Sales and Marketing?”

Come back here to find out :)